Work Text:
Stratt hunched over her computer, typing away at yet another Excel spreadsheet. She opened another tab, watching it load for about ten seconds as her computers RAM tried to find any way it could physically pull up the page she needed.
She'd been trying to solve an issue for a few hours, and had no idea how she, after so much work, still found herself stuck at square one.
Back cracking, she sat up, stretching. She was no use to anyone without any coffee in her system.
She walked to the door, mind in a haze, before pausing, picking her keys up from her side table. Noticing a small object, she reached out to grab it, turning it over in her hand.
Anyone that knew Stratt could say with 100% confidence that she was a neat freak. They'd often walk back into their bunks to find that the room was spontaneously re-arranged. Or they'd open the communal fridge to find all the food cleaned because the presence of so much unnecessary clutter was 'bothering her'. Even all her tabs, the sheer number of which were slowly driving her computer into shutting itself off permanently, were uniquely color-coded and organized.
What, if she was going to be tried for her war-crimes after the project was over, she wanted all the evidence to be neatly kept!
That's why the existence of a small scrap of… cloth? Bandage? Oddly shaped piece of working material? Whatever it was, the idea that it could have traveled from elsewhere and into her private space was horrifying, to say the least.
Scoffing, she inspected it carefully. It was a triangular sort of shape: pointy on the end, but with a semi-circle for a hypotenuse. It was almost akin to the scraps one would see as a child cuts paper for making a paper snowflake. Turning it over, she saw a paper, half peeled off. Taking away the paper fully, she felt the backside and confirmed it was adhesive.
She stared at it for a few moments, very sure she hadn't been the person to bring it in. Eventually she just threw it in the trash, heading out the door.
She was tired, and was likely overthinking.
…
Grace sat in the lab, running calculations for the Astrophage breeders. He zoomed around on his chair (but not too fast; he respected the sanctity of lab safety rules), grabbing paper from every corner of the lab and sticking it on the walls. He stared at his work, nodded, and returned back to the desk, scribbling away frantically.
Ever since he'd gotten rid of his binder and started using trans-tape, he found that he had so much more freedom of movement. He wasn't constantly struggling to breathe all the time, and with the lack of strained ribs came a much, much more bubbly Grace.
Of course, the new change hadn't been without issues. Aside from the initial issues with getting it to work as it should (the marks of blisters from his initial attempts were still clear as day on his skin) he found that trans-tape generated a lot of waste, to say the least. A small part of him felt guilty every time he saw the mess and thought about his environmental impact, but another part of him argued that maybe the world needed the carbon emissions generated from his excessive waste.
However, most of it was just the paper backing, so it wasn't ever too much to deal with. But the small bits that were tape itself…
Not the tape that came off after three days, usually very dirty and not sticky, but the tape that came from rounding off the edges before putting it on.
Grace cringed at the very thought of those small pieces of material from hell. Recently, he'd been finding more and more of them stuck to his clothes, or hidden in his work paper. Sometimes he'd even spot one or two of them under his bed, and jokingly wondered if the trans-fairy would leave him a quarter or two.
Luckily, Grace had managed to keep everything on the 'down low', ensuring to give any escapee scraps he noticed a one-way trip to the trash can.
And despite the myriad of downsides trans-tape had of it's own, Grace found that he preferred it to using a binder.
At the very least, it allowed him to get up and work all across the lab without feeling like his ribs were crushing in on themselves!
Getting up from his seat, he took a whiteboard marker and started scribbling formulas on the glass walls. He held up paper after paper to his calculations, double-checking the amount of black-panels they had developed with the breeding window for Astrophage. He made a few little notes on the side of the document Dr. Redell had given him, adjusting some of his rates to match those found by a few scientists in India.
He'd have to tell Stratt about the change. He made another note, this one mental, and scurried over to his desk, grabbing some tape to stick some loose papers beside his scribbles.
As he got up, stumbling over someone's bag (it was probably Dr. Lokken's… he'd have to brief her on basic lab safety and not keeping loose items on the floor) he heard a small laugh from the corner of the room.
"Not so 'graceful', is he?" Carl joked, standing in the doorway. Stratt merely looked at him, unamused, and Grace rolled his eyes.
"You've been using that pun ever since I got here," he groaned, untangling his foot from the bag strap. "Try something more original!"
Carl raised an eyebrow.
"Like what? You have one better than mine?"
Grace nodded, regaining his balance.
"…I tripped because I'm not really in my 'element' right now. Get it? Element-"
"I get it, and compared to Carl's, it's not very funny," Stratt said sharply. "Now, back to business: I've sent you an email detailing our upcoming trip to meet a few climatologists. As well, I'd like to be briefed on the progress you've made today."
He nodded, letting Stratt type away on her computer as he listed of various formulas, handing her the document he'd filled out thus far. Stratt took all of the information, occasionally looking to Carl for help. After a few minutes, Grace went to unstick some of the papers he'd taped to the glass to give to Stratt. He got a few of them down easily, but he had stuck other one's a bit higher up by using a step school.
Mad science required a lot of space! If he had to shift a bit upward, who was he to not do so?
Carl insisted on helping, boasting about how he was so much taller than Grace as much as he could. He jumped and grabbed a paper, tearing it off the wall as Grace tried to do the same.
"How did you- I was right there!"
"Don't rip the papers," Stratt reminded them bluntly, and Grace lightly punched Carl on the shoulder.
"Yeah, Carl. You heard Stratt, don't rip the…"
The two bickered, and Stratt shook her head.
"Children," she mumbled. "Actual children."
She glanced up from her laptop, intending to chastise Grace about his hypocritical stance of 'no horse-play in the lab' when she froze.
Stratt wasn't a person to forget anything. So when she saw a small piece of that same material she found in her room, stuck on Carl's shirt as he tried (and failed) to reach another paper Grace had stuck, her focus shifted.
"Carl. Carl, wait," she ordered, watching both the men turn to look at her.
"Sorry, I wasn't trying to-" Carl started, but Stratt waved a hand.
"It's not that," she said, walking over and plucking the tape off his shirt. "I've seen this before."
She looked at the pair, holding up the tape. Both of them froze.
Grace felt a sense of numbness wash over him as he stared at the small scrap in her hand.
How had he let this happen??
Worse, Carl was the person who, without knowing his trans identity, gave him trans tape. While the one he ordered online (and had to give very specific instructions to the delivery men on how to deliver) was beige in color, surely Carl would immediately know what it was.
Was this the moment he'd get outed? Was this when the gig was up?
He slowly turned his head to Carl, who stared at Stratt confused.
"That kind of looks like a random piece of paper, I don't know," he said, and Grace breathed a sigh of relief.
Of course.
Carl, unlike Stratt, had the memory of a goldfish.
Stratt pursed her lips, throwing it away in the trash. She grabbed the papers the two had taken down, clearly annoyed.
"Well I've been seeing stuff like this in places they shouldn't be," she said. "We are running a world-saving project here, and I will not have my scientists littering crucial project materials, or random bits of trash around the ship."
Carl raised his hands, shrugging.
"Alright, alright. That's my bad."
"Hm."
She walked out the door, grumbling under her breath. Carl shook his head, and looked at Grace.
"Seriously, how does she notice these things? Next thing you know she'll look at my bunk and tell me a speck of dust is out of place!"
Grace chuckled.
"How could you, Carl! It's very important to keep things clean down to the molecular level."
The both of them laughed, but Grace felt a pit appear in his stomach.
He'd have to start being more careful if he wanted to keep his secret.
…
He started by started intentionally throwing every scrap of trans tape he could find in the trash. He would ensure that after he was done, he had scoured every nook and cranny, locating any tiny pieces he missed.
But whenever he thought he got all of them, one would inevitably escape, stick onto his socks or shoes, and travel elsewhere.
Ilyukhina was the first to notice, complaining when she began to find scraps in her engineering training station.
Grace was baffled. He hadn't even stepped a foot into that room, and had no idea why anything of his would be there.
Her complaining spread to the rest of the crew, and Yáo, who was just as much of a neat freak as Stratt, began to (very respectfully) complain as well.
Soon enough, everyone knew about them. They were small, adhesive backed things of misery that no one could seem to get rid of. They became a fact of life, and every time someone saw one, they'd throw it out.
And it wasn't like Grace was intentionally leaving them around. He could swear he threw every bit of his mess in the trash. It had gotten so bad, he began to do headcounts. He would round the edges of his tape, line up each piece, and count them individually.
It wasn't like he could shout 'One, Two, Three', and have the small pieces of tape respond 'Eyes on me!!', but it allowed him to have a reliable system of throwing everything away in the trash. Eventually he was consistently getting all of them wrangled and promptly disposed, but the legend was already out, and Grace couldn't contain it.
"I don't understand why you make so many chemistry jokes," Carl complained, sitting at the meeting table. "Aren't you a biologist?"
Everyone had gathered a bit early to the weekly briefing, and were very content to discuss Grace's wacky science puns.
"Actually, middle school science covers most of the subjects in a broad sense," Grace explained, bringing his feet up on the table, and leaning back in his chair.
"And really, when you think about it long enough, biology is just chemistry, right?" Annie added.
"Chemistry is simply physics!" Dimitri called out, taking his own seat.
"And," Steve said, "I'd argue that physics is just math."
"So everything is math? It's like my high-school courses all over again," Carl mumbled, and Grace laughed.
"Yep! Down to the molecular level," he said. Carl groaned, shaking his head.
"This is wrong. Everything is these small scraps down to molecular level," Ilyukhina complained, throwing one onto the table. Everyone around the table shouted, and DuBois grabbed it, throwing it away immediately.
"Stratt is about to show up, and you bring one of these things here??" He hissed, glaring at Ilyukhina.
"Sorry, sorry-" Ilyukhina began, but Dr. Redell cut her off.
"She's been getting hella antsy since the launch is nearing," he said, crossing his arms. "You should have learned something from the entire seminar she forced us to sit through on keeping a clean work space!"
"That was because of these??" Carl asked. "I thought it was because DuBois left his glasses in the fridge the other day..."
"I was fatigued," DuBois grumbled. "There is no reason to keep reminding me of that situation."
"Where do you all think they come from?" Dr. Lokken asked. "I was curious so I looked over the materials we've ordered for construction and we don't use anything with adhesive like that…"
Everyone continued their banter, and Grace sat back, heart thundering. Eventually the meeting started, and he took notes, but he wasn't too focused.
He hadn't expected his trans-tape endeavors to garner so much attention in the form of annoyance over small scraps, but now that it had he felt very exposed.
No one knew his secret, but he knew it would only take one person to go digging deep enough, and everything would crumble at his feet.
He just really, really hoped Stratt would drop it.
…
A realization had hit Stratt like a truck a few days after, and when it did, she immediately came to one conclusion.
She had to drop her pestering over the small, annoying scraps of tape.
She had been staring at her desk, going through the moments from the past few weeks, and everything clicked. She understood why Dr. Grace had been so cagey, why she noticed him acting the way he had.
She glanced at the computer on her desk, knowing full well she could pull up his medical records. She had all the power in the world. If she was right, she might pull up his old year book and see him with long hair, or notice the 'F' on his legal documents.
But she pushed the thought out of her mind, shaking her head.
He'd tell her when he was ready, and all Stratt could logically do for him at this moment was drop the subject.
So she glanced at the little scrap she found on her files earlier, and sighed.
Hopefully, as long as she stopped mentioning it, the scraps of tape everywhere would go down as a mere joke and forgotten eventually.